Book Image

Hands-On Big Data Analytics with PySpark

By : Rudy Lai, Bartłomiej Potaczek
Book Image

Hands-On Big Data Analytics with PySpark

By: Rudy Lai, Bartłomiej Potaczek

Overview of this book

Apache Spark is an open source parallel-processing framework that has been around for quite some time now. One of the many uses of Apache Spark is for data analytics applications across clustered computers. In this book, you will not only learn how to use Spark and the Python API to create high-performance analytics with big data, but also discover techniques for testing, immunizing, and parallelizing Spark jobs. You will learn how to source data from all popular data hosting platforms, including HDFS, Hive, JSON, and S3, and deal with large datasets with PySpark to gain practical big data experience. This book will help you work on prototypes on local machines and subsequently go on to handle messy data in production and at scale. This book covers installing and setting up PySpark, RDD operations, big data cleaning and wrangling, and aggregating and summarizing data into useful reports. You will also learn how to implement some practical and proven techniques to improve certain aspects of programming and administration in Apache Spark. By the end of the book, you will be able to build big data analytical solutions using the various PySpark offerings and also optimize them effectively.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Using keyBy() operations to reduce shuffle

In this section, we will use keyBy() operations to reduce shuffle. We will cover the following topics:

  • Loading randomly partitioned data
  • Trying to pre-partition data in a meaningful way
  • Leveraging the keyBy() function

We will load randomly partitioned data, but this time using the RDD API. We will repartition the data in a meaningful way and extract the information that is going on underneath, similar to DataFrame and the Dataset API. We will learn how to leverage the keyBy() function to give our data some structure and to cause the pre-partitioning in the RDD API.

Here is the test we will be using in this section. We are creating two random input records. The first record has a random user ID, user_1, the second one has a random user ID, user_1, and the third one has a random user ID, user_2:

test("Should use keyBy to distribute...